Investigation of bracing to unload muscle and knee contact forces for knee oteoarthritis patients: Modelling, workflow, prototype design and evaluation

Mechanical devices are common non-invasive treatments for knee osteoarthritis, and various brace methods have been proposed with the aim of unloading the knee joint to relieve pain. However, the effect from these devices is debated in the literature and with a globally increasing number of osteoarthritis patients, combined with the absence of a cure, the demand for an efficient treatment with scientific evidence is high.

Often knee osteoarthritis patients experience multiple consultations with the health care system before reaching a satisfactory result, which might be due to the many risk factors for developing the disease. Therefore, subject-specific treatments might be necessary to target the different subgroups based on individual risk factors.

The aim with this PhD work was 1) to analyse various approaches for efficiently unloading the knee joint and 2) to develop and experimentally test a subject-specific knee brace prototype using a concept based on the findings from the first step. It is believed that the findings in this thesis have the potential to advance the state-of-the-art within knee braces, which will improve the quality-of-life for the patients.